US 5,181,208 A · Computation-conserving traffic data transmission method and apparatus

Abstract

In the evaluation of traffic announcements received in digitally encoded form in a data packet, the data packet is decoded continuously, and the traffic announcements are stored in memory after the decoding and evaluation. A computer in the receiver must evaluate the incoming data stream continuously. Since evaluation is difficult, particularly under unfavorable broadcasting conditions in which error corrections may be necessary, the computer would have to have a very complex program structure and configuration. To make it possible to use a simpler computer configuration and program structure, one complete cycle of traffic announcements is first decoded, optionally error corrected and stored in memory. Next, an updating bit present in the data packet and altered upon any change in the traffic announcements, is identified and evaluated. As a fuction of this evaluation, a further complete cycle of traffic announcements is decoded and stored in memory only if the updating bit has altered.

Claims10

Dependent claims

A method for evaluating traffic announcements received in digitally encoded form in a data packet formatted according to Technical Standard 3244-E of the European Broadcasting Union and thus containing a plurality of data blocks, each block consisting of an information word followed by an error correction checkword, in which method the data packet is decoded and the traffic announcements are stored in memory after decoding and evaluation,

comprising, in accordance with the invention, the steps of
decoding at least one data packet and extracting therefrom information as to how many traffic announcements will be broadcast in one complete cycle of announcements, before broadcasting of a repetition or second cycle of said announcements begins;
using said checkwords in detecting and correcting any errors in information words representing traffic announcements;
storing the thus-corrected traffic announcements in memory until a first complete cycle of announcements has been stored;
identifying, in said data packet, at least one bit indicating whether any announcement in said cycle has been updated;
and
decoding and storing, in memory, a further complete cycle of announcements if and only if an update is indicated, thereby conserving computation capacity when an update is not indicated.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Computation-conserving traffic data transmission method and apparatus

Life of this patent

Computation-conserving traffic data transmission method and apparatus

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims10